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I love the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. They are a comedy send-up of the real Nobel Prizes, and their goal is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think".

The Ig Noble prizes are given for genuine research, and when they were first created in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, they were then presented for discoveries "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced".

Just to deal with any conflict of interest, I should point out that I was awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research for my groundbreaking work into what causes bellybutton fluff and why it is almost always blue. Each year 10 Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded, and my eye was especially caught by the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology.

There is a huge stream of psychological research dealing with strange relationships between what our body does, and what our brain does. Back in 1983, John H Riskind found that if people were smiling and had an upright body posture, they were quicker at remembering positive experiences from their past. On the other hand, if they were frowning and had a slumped posture, there were quicker at remembering negative past experiences.

In 1993, Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues explored how we humans mentally represent those strange abstract quantities called "numbers". If we came from a culture that wrote from left to right, then we would tend to represent small numbers to our left, and bigger numbers to our right. It makes sense. After all, that's how numbers are arranged on a ruler, on the information panel above a lift, on a calendar, on a computer keyboard and virtually everywhere you look. It's what we see all the time.

In 1999, Mukul Bhalla and colleagues explored how we humans view hills, or at least their steepness. Not surprisingly, hills appear steeper if you are carrying a heavy backpack, if you are tired from a long run, and if you are not very fit.

In 2007, Katinka Dijkstra and colleagues explored how your body posture affected your access to your memories. Sure enough, if you stood up and waved you were quicker at retrieving a memory of an occasion when you waved at someone, or if you were sitting in a chair clapping your hands you were quicker at retrieving a memory of when you clapped your hands at a concert.

Which brings us to 2011 and the paper of Anita Eerland and colleagues about leaning to the left making the Eiffel Tower seem smaller. They used a Wii balance board. The Wii is a home video game console made by Nintendo, and one of its accessories is the Wii balance board that has multiple pressure sensors to work out the user's centre of balance. The subjects of the study were told to keep themselves vertical on the balance board by looking at crosshairs on the screen in front of them.

In the best tradition of psychology experiments, the experimenters lied to the subjects. In reality, the experimenters manipulated the crosshairs so that there was a 2 per cent difference in weight between the left and right feet on the Wii balance board.

The first set of questions involved quantities such as the height of buildings or the population of cities. The second set of questions had answers that were all numbers between one and 10, such as how many number one hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands. And sure enough, according to the authors of this paper, in the same way that we imagine small numbers to be on the left, when it comes to the Eiffel Tower, if you're leaning to the left you tend to under-estimate its height.

But when you go deeper into the paper, you find that when humans are tricked into leaning to the right, they do not guess high and do not over-estimate the height of the Eiffel Tower. No, their answer is the same as when they are standing vertically.

And when you look carefully at the statistics, you find that only 7-17 per cent of the variance in the results (for example, people guessing low on the height of the Eiffel Tower) was explained by manipulating the posture of the subjects. The majority of the results was not explained by which way they were leaning.

With this many complicated statistical outcomes, it's hard to know what this paper actually reveals. But this paper really does seem to qualify to win an Ig Nobel Prize — and I can say that definitely, despite the fact that I'm leaning to the left and standing on one leg as I say this…